More on Helms, Republicans, and civil rights

From an excellent post by Kevin D. Williamson on Nation Review Online:

Helms and Thurmond were contemporaries in that their careers overlapped, but Thurmond had been in the Senate for decades before Helms ever held office, and Thurmond had — again, let's point it out, since the AP surely won't, as a Democrat — staged the longest filibuster in Senate history to block the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which was proposed by a Republican president, Eisenhower, and passed on Republican support in Congress. How a reporter can write about Helms and Thurmond and the civil rights era without at least noting the institutional hostility of the Democratic party toward these bills is mysterious. (Someday, somebody will figure out that Republicans have been responsible for the most important civil rights actions, starting with the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Klan Act, the 1957 and 1960 acts, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. But this isn't the place for that discussion.) And why isn't Helm's precessor as alleged "standard-bearer for civil rights opponents" Sen. Robert K. Byrd, a Democrat who is still in the Senate and who was launched into his political career by serving as Exhalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan?

The whole post is worth reading to fight through the contemporary spin that Republicans have been traditionally against civil rights. Also note this a little earlier:

On the subject of Helm's life before the Senate, you'd be hard pressed to take away from Margasak's piece anything about Helms's career as a Democratic operative or the role of the Democratic party in trying to block the civil rights acts that were passed, after all, on Republican support. Instead, we get this:

No to civil rights. No to abortion. No to communism. No to the United Nations. No to gay rights. No to arts funding with nakedness. No to school busing. No to the U.S. giving up the Panama Canal. No to a nuclear arms reduction treaty called Salt II.

One of these things is not like the others, no? Helms wasn't even in the Senate until 1973, after the major civil rights legislation had been passed. It is true that Helms worked against those bills — as a supporter of Democrats such as Beverly Lake. On the issues where Helms actually had a Senate vote — the NEA, the abortion, school busing, &c. — Helms's record is pretty good. But Helms was a conservative and a Southerner, so it is essential that he be tarred as an unreconstructed racist.

UPDATE: Here is an interesting counterargument (of sorts) made by a liberal e-mailer to Jonah Goldberg. Here's his conclusion:

Many of us liberals have discussions with conservatives all the time, respect them, and don't assume conservatives are racists, but this circle the wagons defense of Helms is just odd. I realize that times are tough for Republicans at the moment, but I think it is counterproductive to take this line on Helms, as well as intellectually specious, craven even. It wouldn't be throwing him under the bus to make a differentiated argument about the good and bad (from a conservative point of view) that he has done. I'm sorry you don't see that.